


The Grey

by orphan_account



Category: Dragon Age: Origins, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Big Bang Challenge, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Crossover, Dark Horror, Dragon Age Crossover, Fuck the Deep Roads, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Magic, Near Death Experiences, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-21
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-11 11:45:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7048378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warden Ren is trained in the arcane arts as a bloodmage and necromancer, with power over life and death. Ser Brendon Hux is a former Templar warrior who fights alongside his fellow Grey Warden and their companions to end the Blight threatening the whole of Thedas. Yet a terrible battle with an ancient evil shows Ren that he has another power he did not know he had: the power to heal, when he must rescue Hux from certain death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Grey

_F_ _irst_ _day, they come and catch everyone._

_Second day, they beat us and eat some for meat._

_Third day, the men are all gnawed on again._

_Fourth day, we wait and fear for our fate._

_Fifth day, they return and it’s another girl’s turn._

_Sixth day, her screams we hear in our dreams._

_Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew._

_Eighth day, we hate it as she is violated._

_Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin._

_Now she does feast, as she’s become the beast._

_Now you lay and wait, for their screams will haunt you in your dreams._

What is lyrical about the mutterings of the diminutive dwarf woman is broken and made vile by the wet sound of her gnawing on her own fingers, and yet nevertheless it is an appropriate song for the Deep Roads. The bowels of the Earth, from which the vile plague of Darkspawn spill forth from crevices upon the face of Thedas like so much sick sputum.

Their footsteps echo in the halls: long abandoned dwelvings of the dwarves of Orzammar. Other than Hespith's mutterings, the darkness has managed to press down upon them and fill their throats with the silence of dread. They are an unlikely band of "heroes," traversing this waste to combat an evil that few of their kind is even able to comprehend exists beneath their feet. There is the man who was once a Templar - an example of stalwart faith in the Maker, a subsequent Sister of the faith with more blood on her hands than charity, a dwarf cast out of his society whose aura of liquor vapor one could light with match, and two renegade mages; one whose power stems from blood and death, and the other from deception.

The ghoul snaps her head toward the Templar, perhaps drawn to the light that pulses inside him like a dying creature. The audible snap of a spine cracking tears through the air, and she begins to slink toward the warrior in a trail of pus.

“The Grey,” she suckles on her hand. The flesh has peeled back to reveal gnawed bone, and she pops off with a wet squelch. “The corruption inside you. Your blood. You are the Grey.”

“Stand down, beast,” Ser Hux orders, wrenching his soaked blade from its scabbard. He sneers down at the creature and she blinks, both eyes milky and opaque with infection. The cataracts have taken her sight, but she scuffles forward and laves along his blade with an oily black tongue.

“Two. Guard against the dark. Grey. The Grey,” she mouths, a fountain of blood bubbling from her maw.

He rips his sword back and balks, now glaring at Kylo Ren to do something.

"Charming little thing, isn't she?" Kylo glances out of the corner of his eye at the ghoul, this once-dwarf that has become corrupted by the blight-sickness, and by horrors once witnessed. These things bother him less than they do Hux, for Kylo is both a bloodmage and a necromancer, and death and pain are his mediums.

He nudges the ghoul with the toe of his boot, dislodging that swollen, corpuscular tongue from Hux's blade. Indeed, they are the Grey. Grey Wardens, the last bastion of Order against perpetual darkness, who have tasted of the blood of an archdemon and lived. If living is what this constant nightmare they have been plunged into could be called. Not only by day must they face creatures such as this: creatures parents do not even dream to whisper of in frightening naughty children, but they must endure the screams, the mutterings, and the reaching blackness of despair within the throes of thinned sleep. That is the price - the curse - of being a savior _._

"You were leading us to the broodmother?" Kylo reminds the tattered, pocked ghoul; rags of some ancient clothing barely clinging to her emaciated form.

She turns sightless eyes on him, shoves her fingers back into her mouth and begins to gum at them once more, spittle leaking from the corners of her lips. As she turns away and begins shuffling once more down the gloomy hall, she mutters again:

_Now she does feast, as she’s become the beast._

_Now you lay and wait, for their screams will haunt you in your dreams._

Kylo glances at Hux, and a small crease forms between his brows. The mage adjusts his staff on his back, though his real weapons are blades, and he bristles with him.

"I could shield you, if you're... worried," Kylo offers.

Hux glances at Kylo and the fresh scar bisecting his features. He swallows his sigh, drinking from the calm gaze of his fellow Warden otherwise surrounded by chaos: wild hair, brows matted in blood, and the thundercloud of power that roils at his fingertips. Two months ago, Hux would have seared the maleficar with a withering look for such an offer, but now his gaze slinks over to the witch and the songstress.

“You should shield them,” he nods, reflecting on the ghoul’s laments.

Ren's eyes slide over to Morrigan, "the witch," who is eyeing them both balefully with eyes as gold as a cat's. They twinkle in the torchlight which is gripped in Oghren's meaty hand. The dwarf raises a flask to his lips and whatever foul liquid passes for recreation dribbles down either side of his tufted red beard. Though it is definitely not needed fortitude if Oghren's disinterested, beady stare is anything to go by.

"I can take care of myself, you know, Templar brat," Morrigan drawls in a tone that manages to be both condescending and amused at the same time.

Leliana glances at them all in turn, her red hair brushing the quiver of arrows at her shoulder. She gestures with the tip of her bow, which is at ready in her hand.

"She's almost around the corner," the bard comments. "I don't relish being down here longer than necessary. "Shall we?"

Hux shoots Morrigan an acerbic look before shouldering past Kylo. He marches up to Leliana and stops besides her, sweeping the entire group with another glance.

“We cannot charge in blind. Anyone have a strategy?” he demands.

Kylo Ren brandishes a knife and slips the flat end along the skin of his palm, until the tip reaches the center. He presses down, just hard enough to draw a tiny bead of blood, which he tongues away with a smile.

"Kill everything?"

Oghren laughs, a grunting, sonorous sound that echoes. "I'll drink to that, you sodding freak."                      

Hux glowers and grinds his teeth, unwilling to entertain their reckless leader. “Now is not the time for your twisted amusements, maleficar. We need a battle formation.”

Ren rolls his eyes at the word _maleficar_ , having been referred to as almost nothing else by this man. This shining example of the failure of the Templar Order has redeeming qualities, not the least of which was that he had, in fact, absconded of his own free will from the tradition that sequestered and oppressed Ren's own kind, be they blood mages or spirit healers. Further, Ren decided some time ago, Ser Brendon Hux is also rather more intelligent and quite a bit stronger than his haphazardly spewed vituperation and the wiry frame beneath that heavy plate armor.

How Ren had ever ended up the leader of this ragtag bunch is beyond him, but he sighs and gestures after the ghoul with his dagger, taking the first steps toward whichever flavor of doom awaits them this day.

"I need a damn bath and a bottle of wine," he grouses as he walks, not bothering to pitch his voice low.

“Indulgent, even until the end,” Hux sniffs and turns to follow.

"Hey," Oghren quips. "If yer gonna go out, ya might as well be drunk."

"For a second I thought you were going to say you might as well smell pretty," Ren smiles, stepping around rubble from ancient cave ins.

The dwarf laughs, and the flask of liquor disappears into his armor somewhere as he hefts his ax.

Ahead of them, the ghoul has paused, no longer muttering, but wringing her hands. The group approaches slowly, Ren feeling that crawling sensation like a thousand spiders flooding his veins and bile burning the back of his throat. Whispers assail his ears.

"There are Darkspawn nearby," he intones, for the taint in his blood warns him as surely as tracks in the dust.

The ghoul looks up sharply, sightless eyes boring into them.

"Now the time is nigh, you come upon her, you die."

“Be gone,” Hux commands. “You’ve served your purpose, creature.” The back of his skull suddenly pricks with dread, ice heavy in his veins. He feels as if his ribs have been pried open and he swallows thickly, also sensing the Darkspawn that Ren speaks of. The Taint furrows through him, binding he and the mage to corruption, to the blighted abominations that ooze out from the darkness. He holds his breath, suddenly filled with nausea as a sac of rotten flesh undulates above their heads.

Ren eyes the sac with distaste, and risks a glance at his boots, which are thick with pus from walking through the blasted things which infest the hallways of the Roads as surely as vermin and cobwebs.

Having been given permission from Hux, Hespith, or what remains of her, turns and flees, a muted, erratic giggle bouncing back along the walls as she goes. She has led them to the end of a tunnel, and Ren can see an opening in the wall, a gaping hole of black. From within, a stench emanates that is worse, somehow, than death, of which they have smelled upon the rank battlefields of war.

With a thought, Ren summons a glowing ball of mage light, which hovers beside his shoulder with an incandescent glow. He glances at Morrigan, silently suggesting she do the same, only to find she already has. He casts her a soft smile of appreciation. If a wayward, spiteful Templar and a drunken dwarf are here to make his life difficult as he bumbles through the duties of leadership, this hedgemage surely is here to make it easier.

The corruption has grown worse, fetid rot pulsing beneath their boots as the blighted ground squelches with pus and blood. Hux had nearly choked on his own vomit their first day in the Deep Roads, when a shriek had tackled him onto the oozing surface. The smell had slammed him harder than the blow, rattling his skull as he retched and writhed. Worse than the piss and shit of a dead man’s final moments, Hux could only watch in horror as Ren’s attempt at _helping_ imploded the shriek’s physical form and filled his open mouth with black, greasy flesh.

He swallows down a film of bile now.

The Blight sprawls along the walls and floor, thrumming along every inch as Hux’s chest begins to constrict with dread. It defiles him in that familiar way, clawing for his lungs, closing around his throat. No, not now. Live first. Panic later.

“Let’s go,” he says, eyeing the gaping maw of darkness with strained valor.

Hux is suddenly leading the way, stalking bravely down the hall with sword and shield, and Ren might have found that laughable if he was not quite so fond of the redhead. He hurries his step, and places long, lithe fingers on Hux's elbow to slow him. The mage light bobs overhead, illuminating a halo of two feet about them.

"Hang back," Ren whispers. "Let us see what lies around the corner before we make our move. Oghren can see better in the dark than we."

With a gesture, he waves the dwarf forward, who grunts, and sidles along the wall to the black maw. He peers around the edge for a moment, pulls back, and the looks again. When he finally straightens and steps back a few paces to speak to the small throng of his companions, his face his an unhealthy mix of white and green.                      

Hux stills, obeying Ren’s order. He peers at him, straining in the darkness as the mage light offers a shred of reprieve. It casts long shadows down Ren’s face, deepening the purple splotches beneath his eyes. He is nearly shrouded in it, swallowed up as it steals his youth, for Hux had nearly fallen off the tavern stool when he’d discovered the man – or perhaps on the cusp of being a man – is nineteen years of age.

He opens his mouth, though turns his attention to the disturbed dwarf. “Speak,” he whispers harshly, nausea settling like a rock in his stomach.

Ren keeps his finger's on Hux's elbow, though the action is not necessary. He takes a certain pleasure in the fact that the former Templar does not shake him off. There is a small comfort, also, in the warmth that always seems to radiate from the redhead, like he is filled with a burning sun.

Oghren clears his throat. "Well, I hate to admit it, but I sure as fuck ain't ever seen that many tits in one place."

"Maker's breath," Leliana hisses.

"What?" Oghren grunts. "Why don't you go take a peek, sugar-lips? You like that kinda thing don’t you?" When Leliana makes no move or further comment, Morrigan sidles up beside them.

"He is obviously speaking of the broodmother," she whispers, and gestures at the opening.

Hux blinks and then remembers to glower at the witch. “Broodmother?”

“Mothers of darkspawn,” Morrigan sniffs, as if Blight creatures were as common as elfroot. “They are wholly corrupted, flesh and mind, tainted to serve a single purpose: birthing the children. Have you listened to nothing, fool?”

_Seventh day, she grew as in her mouth they spew._

_Eighth day, we hate it as she is violated._

_Ninth day, she grins and devours her kin._

_Now she does feast, as she’s become the beast._

“They’re… they were once -- “

“Yes,” she snaps, mana sharpening beneath her fingers.

"These fuckers were once dwarves?" Oghren spills the words on all their lips, his face a contorted grimace. "I say we send the lot of them to the Void."

"Yes," Ren says softly, "that is indeed why we have come." He finally releases Hux, though remains looking at him until the warrior glances at him, meets his eyes. Ren offers a smile, unsure what he means to convey. Comfort? A promise of security? Whatever it is, it is something deeper than mere camaraderie, and Hux flushes brilliantly beneath his freckles and looks away, scraping the edge of his longsword through a sac of pus.

"Shall we?" Ren says, and approaches the door, mage light growing in strength as though a harbinger of doom to whatever lies within.

Hux’s blade is drawn and he nods, prompting three more that follow from the rest of their group. They all look to the youngest of them, the most reckless, and await his command.

Ren eases forward into the room, realizing a younger version of him might have covered his nose at the fetid stench. Even at the tender age of nineteen, however, he has smelled the voided bowels and retched vomit of battlefields, corpses rotting in the sun as they are picked clean by crows, bodies perhaps never washed, the offal and despair of cramped cities.

He rolls his sleeves up, exposing the crosshatching of scars there, and does not wait for the broodmother or the genlocks he knows to be near to engage before he draws a line with his blade along a white scar. It wells with blood, and he begins to mouth silent words.

Through the combined effort of the mage light, Hux discerns the outline of a massive, festering mound, sprawled along the far wall. He audibly gags when the stench fills his nostrils, willing himself to stand upright as he beholds the broodmother. Her body is swollen and purple, spilling down on itself in thousands of distended breasts. Genlocks suckle on the raw nipples, squelching and gurgling off the corruption that protrudes from every which direction like a growth. She was dwarven once, he realizes, gaping at her stretched face now infected with blight sores. The ground undulates beneath their feet, rot pulsing like a heartbeat as the Blight molders around them.

Hux raises his shield so as not to double over and throw up.

The floor is crawling with tentacles, reaching across the room, which has been mined and crumbled into more of a cavern. There are openings behind the broodmother, leading farther into the darkness, and as they look on, the broodmother's eyes lock upon lock upon them and utters an affronted, righteous shriek of pure fury. A tentacle snaps from the floor, grasping at Ren, but he pushes a spell from his earliest memories outward, freezing the first three feet of the appendage.

"Oghren," he shouts, all semblance of stealth forgotten.

"On it," the dwarf answers, and lifts his mighty double bladed ax in a hefty swing that severs two more tentacles.

Also without needing instruction, for they fight well as a group, Leliana takes up purchase on a mound of fallen stones, and takes aim at the broodmother even as she is singing a lulling tune beneath her voice. Protection, for her fellows.

Hux charges forth, cleaving a tentacle in half with his blade. The broodmother screams, a sound so shrill it cracks off his shield, and he whirls around to slice through another.

“Darkspawn!” he thunders, and Morrigan swivels her head in time to see genlocks pouring through the dark tunnels.

Her mana brews, bubbling off her skin as she holds position, fingers clutched around her hacked and whittled staff. Hux senses the Veil shifting as she pulls from it, warping around her as she mounts with a pressure that thumbs the inside of his skull.

“I need a barrier,” he growls toward the mages, slamming his shield against a writhing tentacle.

Ren calls on the power that sings through his blood, wiping one black-nailed finger through it and chanting an incantation as he traces a pattern in the air between himself and Hux. The Veil is so thin with both be and Morrigan drawing upon it that it makes Ren giddy, takes the pain away from the bleeding cut on his arm.

When he completes the glyph and drops his hand, a red marking appears beneath Hux's feet, all whorls and dots, and it casts a haze of reddish light around him. As he spins through the room, slicing and tentacles until he collides with a genlock, the barrier follows him.

Convinced he is safe for the moment, Ren turns his attention to another genlock that is hurtling toward them, and with a motion of his hand, a rock the size of Oghren detaches from the rubble and flings itself across the room, colliding with the creature in a crunch of bone and splattering of blood.              

Morrigan calls upon lightning that tears a chain through eight genlocks. The smell of burnt flesh causes Hux’s stomach to rumble, and he watches one seizing violently. Its lips had been chewed off, revealing two rows of serrated teeth dripping in crimson, and he pierces its throat until metal severs the creature’s spine. Another hurtles at him, though it recoils with a screech, eyes rolling back into its skull. Met with Ren’s warding corruption magic, blood begins to funnel down its nose as the genlock writhes in place and finally implodes into hunks of slop.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ren sees a new foe, a more formidable being which bears the name Emissary and is known for its ability to use magic. Before all the rest of these fodder genlock fighters in their crude armor, this creature must go down. Ren shouts for Hux knowing that he needs not only his own blood, but that the negating skills of his fellow as well in order to bring the Emissary down quickly. When he captures his attention, he gestures at the genlock spell master, with its helm of bone and fashioned horns, its neck glittering with jewels likely ripped from the necks of its victims.

Hux whirls at Ren’s command, and he shucks a flap of intestine from his blade. The glyph forms a sheath of red around him, possessive, protecting the tainted knight with sinister intent. It allows Hux to sprint between thick, vestigial tentacles protruding from the ground and each of the broodmother’s swipes recoil with an ear-splitting shriek. The spell won’t endure, he thinks to himself, scrabbling for a glass draught of lyrium in his pack. Morrigan casts another glyph of resistance around him and it steels with a distinctly different aura than Ren’s, using the pull of the Fade rather than the will of a life force.

The Veil thins around him as he slugs down the lyrium, gritting his teeth with the sharp slap of the Fade that now infects his veins. The taste of it pulses inside his core and he grinds his teeth, calling upon his Templar training as mage would mana. The Emissary spots him with a roar and casts a mind-snapping hex, only for it to flinch around the fortification that Hux’s allies have temporarily secured for him.

Ren, for all his power, is no master of the art of war; truly, he has been called to face many horrific scenes and battles, but it is only recently that he has been pushed headfirst into the role of leadership like a farm boy into a trough of pig-slop. He's not suited for it, not growing up in the relative comforts of a noble home until he was transported to the Circle. There his hands remained soft, and his dreams were of pretty boys and harassing senior enchanters. Ren does not understand those like Oghren who live for war, and it is visible in his face, bristled red beard dripping black blood and split with a white grin as he cleaves tentacles from the broodmother and limbs from the genlock horde.

While Ren may have trouble with larger pictures still, at this tender age of nineteen and his inexperience in the cold cruelty of the real, dark world, he is able to render addition quickly, and it is no small realization that they are becoming vastly outnumbered. Five against the small hoard that is pouring out from the fissures between which the vile broodmother gestates, dripping viscera filthy red and lacerations swollen with pus.

He can feel the tug at his life force, different from the encompassing headiness of the active Fade, as his blood becomes his mana. It snaps out with a spell that freezes a genlock in place, causes it to turn on its fellow, and dig dirty claws into its neck, oozing darkness and life. The creature he controls now turns on another genlock, and swings at it with a crude ax, taking a leg off below the knee. Ren is so keen on this macabre marionette that he does not realize that the red aura of protection surrounding Hux is fading with his distraction. All he can feel is the blood, singing in his ears.

Leliana maintains a steady stream of arrows from her post and genlocks thud around Hux with pierced throats. Lightning cracks through the air, holding a swath of the blighted creatures off as they seize and froth beneath the wrath of the witch. It clears a path between Hux and the Emissary, and a burst of corruption magic claws for his very essence, only to be scarcely rebuffed by Morrigan’s lingering glyph.

Hux begins to mutter under his breath in prayer, steeling his heart and blade as he charges forth:

_Though all before me is shadow,_

_Yet shall the Maker be my guide._

_I shall not be left to wander the drifting roads of the Beyond._

_For there is no darkness in the Maker’s Light._

He calls upon a holy smite, and without warning, a beam of light tears through the darkness. It rips down from the air and illuminates the cavern with blinding white heat. Hux instinctively shields his eyes, loathe to have his vision permanently burned away as the light sears through blighted flesh. Genlocks scamper toward the shadows, clawing for the reprieve of darkness, and the collective screams of the repelled abominations burst around him. Yet it is the broodmother, so affronted, so revolted by the call of the Light, that her shriek ruptures inside his skull. The pain whips the balance from his knees and he spills forward, eyes widened as he catches himself on his shield.

His world is suddenly plunged into a bone-deep silence despite the carnage roaring around him. He blinks, clawing for reason. Shrieks. Silence. Intestines. Silence. Ribcages. Silence. Hux sobs and freezes in horror when he realizes that his eardrums have shattered. Warm blood oozes from his ears and he watches the Emissary nearly snap in half, eyes rolling back into its exposed skull as it pitches forward and begins to spew up black, fetid entrails. He has severed the creature’s connection to the Fade and it slumps into a heap, writhing and choking on vomit, as would any magical creature smited by the wrath of the Maker. A sweep of his blade severs the Emissary’s spinal cord, and his own throat begins to close, chest constricting.

Panic swells inside his lungs and he screams, muted, needing out, needing fucking out and, and _Maker help him_ –-

A pain so caustic tears through him that he is wrenched from his own mind, and in a flood of shock he looks down to find his own bowels spilling from his gut.

The song in Ren's head, the red song, is shattered into cacophonous splinters by the ear splitting shriek to his his left, and his head whips around. Hazel eyes blackened by magic-lust go wide, round with fear and denial as he sees Hux slumped upon his knees. The mage light that is their only source of illumination beyond the flicker of lightning, jumps, flares, wans, all in accordance to the myriad emotions that tear through Ren at the sight of the man holding in his entrails with one hand while fending off a genlock with his shield. From his position, Ren can sense the life ebbing, the spiral around the grime-choked drain, the echo of death. It is rabid, clawing, seeking, claiming.

"No!" Ren screams, denying her. He is a blood mage. He flirts with death with every draw of his blade, every cast that rips away a part of himself, forever twirling his soul in a dark dance on a precipice at the edge of black nothingness.

The warden tears himself from his stunned horror and trips over stone, skids and nearly slips in the viscous blood and entrails that now comprise the floor of this place, and crosses the ten feet that separate him from Hux with curses to the Maker. Unwise, perhaps, but fuck Him. Fuck Him for this: _I should order someone to do something. Anything._ Ren reaches out and clutches at Hux's shoulder, and the man, seeming to have lost years, gazing at him with the terribly open eyes of a child in pain, in turn grasps Ren's arm. Attentive or callous, this is no God that Ren ascribes to. Not one that allows a young follower to taste his power only to be eviscerated a moment later. It is like nothing more than divine humor, laughter blending now with screams and with the panicked pants that shudder through Hux as Ren drops to his knees beside him.

_He should do something. Anything._

Ren grasps Hux's shoulder, and the man turns the eyes of a child upon him, huge and begging and so, so green.

“Ren,” Hux means to sob, but it’s drowned inside his mouth as he begins to choke on his own blood.

"It's okay, it's okay, it's okay," Ren chants, not even looking as he tosses a spell at the nearest genlock that Hux had nearly taken down. He closes his fist, and pulls the life force from the creature, and just before it dies, it explodes, and it's three nearest fellows with it.

With wild eyes, Ren presses a hand over Hux's, the one holding his guts in, and he glances about the room. The genlock are flagging under their onslaught, but the broodmother remains strong.

With one blood caked hand, Ren snags Hux's narrow chin, noticing in that moment that seems to slow in time that the fine hair upon it is so soft, and he screams:

"Do you trust me?"                   

The edges of Hux’s vision begin to blur and he stares at Ren with wide eyes. They leak with tears, spilling down into his open mouth that fountains with blood. He’s suddenly vomiting, staining his cuirass crimson, staining Ren’s bare fingertips. The mage is mouthing something in desperation, screaming with spittle, and Hux blinks with small hitches. His skull buzzes and he nods instinctively, gripping onto Ren as if the necromancer were the bulwark between him and imminent death.

Ren sees the shroud of death on Hux's face, clinging to that pale skin with white and green, and he doesn't understand the answer Hux gives him, but he knows he cannot wait. The hand that rests on Hux's shoulder moves, grasping the dagger at Hux's belt, jerking it out. He'd lost his. Somewhere.

Ren drags the blade over his wrist, over the life-well, because he needs to be drowning in the same darkness as Hux at this moment: he needs to be fading, and blurring at the edges, to tear aside their enemies.

The blood is called easily to the surface of Ren's pale, scarred forearm, and he begins to whisper, and instead of flowing, the thick liquid transforms, rising from his flesh, joining with the pools of wasted life surrounding Hux, and hovers in the air around them. It is a miasma of death, and life, all at once.

He closes an arm around Hux's shoulders, and tugs the armored knight into himself, and whispers something in his ear, and then his hand shoots out, and the blood is like a dagger, hurtling toward the broodmother. It collides with her face, melds like a mask, and then begins to seep into the corners of her eyes as she screams her affront. Slowly, her face begins to swell, turn purple, and then, with a shower of yet more blood and brain matter and sharp skull fragments, the head explodes, and she is nothing but a mound of flesh upon which genlock once festered.

Ren stares for a moment, anger seething through him, righteous rage making him boil, and then he feels the edges of faintness. He knows he's overspent, and that he's called upon what little life Hux has left to give.

With a hoarse voice, he screams for Morrigan. Oghren. Leliana. He screams for the Maker to help him, as Hux's body collapses backward to meld with the ragged floor and Ren can no longer hold him up.

But it is someone else that answers.

 

* * *

 

  _The Light shall lead her safely,_

_Through the paths of this world, and into the next._

_For she who trusts in the Maker, fire is her water._

_As the moth sees the light and goes toward flame,_

_She should see fire and go towards Light._

Hux finds no light.

He sinks into a darkness so cold it infects the marrow of his bones, threading claws through his brain and drowning every shred of his essence. It is a cruel siren’s melody, piercing hooks into flesh that drag him deeper until, suddenly, a heat funnels through him.

Darkspawn.

The corruption pulses inside his ribcage, thumbing against his heart that wheezes and strains for life.

 _The Grey. The corruption inside you. Your blood. You are the Grey_.

He scrabbles; they’re near, they’re –-

_Two. Guard against the dark. Grey. The Grey._

Hux’s eyes crack open and he rasps, air rattling between each rib as his chest erupts with fire. He’s flailing, fingers scrabbling, jaw pried apart in a silent scream as he paws at the genlock with its fingers fitted inside him. Though, genlocks don’t have hazel eyes, or wild, thick hair, or the desperation of a man on the brink. They don’t have the raw despair of someone who has lost too much, or perhaps just enough, to sustain the flame of soldiering resolve.

They don’t have the hands of a healer.

Ren has lost possession of his body. He feels blood dripping from his nose, his forehead, like the trickle of a lazy evening shower. His magelight, drawing from the Fade, is flickering, but there is silence, at least. The darkspawn have retreated.

Ren rips aside Hux's armor with desperate fingers, tossing it with a hard clatter into the growing stillness of the room. He finds himself whispering a mantra. A plea. _Don't go. Don't leave me._

Ren does now know what power infuses his hands, but beneath him, Hux begins to knit back together. Wounds close, pulsing pink and white, and Ren feels... half hard between his legs, buzzing in his skull, wetness on lips, and for a brief moment he is worried that his need to heal this man has opened his soul to a demon of desire.

But no. Not in this mess. Not in a lake of blood, and not near death himself. This must be something more.

Hux's eyes flicker, open as pale as his alabaster skin. Ren's hands are hot on his belly, pulsing with power, dripping red from his own wounds that he has not yet healed, painting the Templar's pale belly, bleeding into the wounds that are closing.

Somehow.

“Hux?” he whispers, rawly.

Hux watches Ren’s lips move and he shudders, soaked in a frigid swath except for a pulse of heat inside his core. He scarcely registers calloused fingertips pouring a stream of warmth into him and he whimpers, soundlessly, wondering if he has reached the Golden City.

“You’re okay,” Ren whispers, a hand leaving bloody fingerprints on a pale freckled cheek,

“I have you.”

 

* * *

 

Hux screams himself awake, plagued by nightmares of darkspawn and claws culling his organs from his ribcage. The sound of his own voice is jarring: it’s too raw. Too _loud_.

He gasps, groping for purchase upon any given surface, and snaps horrified eyes upon a familiar face.

Ren is exhausted, bandages wound around a wrist he could not heal, stained deep red, his head faint, but he is awake, watchful. He's had Oghren and Leliana help to build them a tent against the wall: a ragged thing made of offcast cloaks, and he's asked Morrigan to ward them. A brazier burns in their small refuge, Hux nestled in both his own bed roll and Ren's.

"Stop. I'm here. It's okay. You're okay," Ren gasps, grasping at Hux's flailing hands, gripping onto one, even though the tug at his sliced sinew makes him wince and grind his teeth.

“R--Ren?” Hux croaks, eyes wide, and a hand flies up to his ear in shock.

Ren brushes hair away from Hux’s forehead. “It’s me. I’m here,” he repeats softly. “You’re safe.”

A small noise breaks at the back of Hux’s throat and he visibly trembles. “I’m…? This isn’t the Golden City?”

Ren cracks a grin, lopsided, eyes tired. “Would you expect to find me there?”

Hux splutters raggedly. “...No.”

Ren’s fingers trail from Hux’s forehead, over his pale cheekbone, into the hollow of his throat, and down his naked chest. They flutter over the pink scar on his belly. It’s ragged, but fresh, and clean.

“I… healed you. I called, and a spirit... It came.” The eyes that look down on Hux are blown dark, full of something deeper than lust.

Hux shudders, gasping softly as Ren trails a padded fingertip down the slopes and arches of his skin. “Desire?” he whispers, nearly giving into it himself. A hollow ache burns in his chest, and he licks his bottom lip. His tongue feels fat, too wet, too heavy.

Ren gazes at him, taking in the way his freckles are picked out by the dim firelight, as well as the red in his hair. His pallor is both frightening, and endearing, and something inside Ren compels him to lean forward, to take Hux’s pallid, chapped lips against his. They are dry, parched, but Ren only holds to the gesture, conveying the spirit that resonates in his soul. The one that answered when he called for someone to help him heal Hux.

Love.

Hux whines, not exactly in protest, but relief. He feels stitched whole, thrumming with a warmth that spreads to his toes. Ren’s mouth is too large, too encompassing, and Hux feels that familiar sense of dread raking down his spine. Though his chest begins to bloom, not with panic, but with something far more uncertain.

Ren smells sharp, like copper and a powerful demense, but his mouth is plush and pliant when Hux kisses him with soft reservation, peppering him with the type of innocent exploration reserved for children.

The Grey Warden, little more than a youth, inexperienced and yet overburdened all at once, sinks into the kiss like it is a breath of air after struggling beneath waters. He cards a hand through Hux’s tousled, sweaty, bloody hair, and traces fingertips down the veins of his arms, reveling in the way that blood flows from bicep to the crook of an elbow to the wrist, and finally into his hand. Ren twines their fingers together.

Hux whimpers and tests a small lick at the corner of Ren’s mouth, needing to taste him, to be inside him, someway, somehow. His face is on fire, spreading down to his chest, because Ren has seen every ounce of him and threaded back all the pieces. He’s suddenly too engulfed, too aflame, surrounded by heat and silk and Ren licking him apart with the pulse of a tongue and _Maker help him_ because it’s perfect, so, _so_ perfect that he cracks with a sigh and allows a maleficar to pry him apart and seep inside.

And then Ren is drowning in the silken heat of that mouth, tongue tracing the ridges of teeth, exploring the shape of him, the tenderness of his flesh, forgetting to breathe. Hux tastes like harsh metal and salt and Oghren’s acid brew he’d taken for the pain, and of something else: the blue and white heat and cold and mystery of the Fade, and… crushed flower petals… like the spirit which had brought Hux back to him when Ren had called so desperately for help. Even now, she is near, and the hand in Hux’s hair, the fingers on his cheek glow with an ethereal light, still seeking injury, still offering comfort.

Hux gasps and pulls off the kiss with swollen lips. “Ren,” he sucks in gulps of air, suddenly frigid, as if the mage has siphoned out a shred of life only recently restored to him. “What was that? What is happening?” he croaks, flinching at the sound of his splintered voice.

He paws for Ren’s face, needing his warmth, that mouth.

Ren gazes down at him from where he rests on his knees at Hux's side, and he smooths the soft skin of one of the warrior's arms.

"In the battle, I called for someone to help me, when you were..." Ren can't bring himself to say the word "dying," for some reason, even though death is as familiar to him now as his own reflection.

"I did not expect what came. A spirit." He holds up one hand, glowing delicately and radiating warmth, peace, comfort. All alien things in their world. "They say in the Circle that a spirit chooses a caster... not the other way around. Can you not see who has chosen me?"

Hux’s face blanches and he attempts to sink into the ground. “N--no. A _demon_. You’ve exposed yourself to possession,” he whispers harshly.

"No, you fool," Ren says softly, and touches Hux's face with that same hand. Images are shared, of bridges in the Fade, of fingers twined together, and sensations of solidity, union, caring, concern.

"You studied spirit-healing. You know it is not the same as possession. It is a partnership. Love is no demon."

Hux stares at Ren and shivers, choking on the word:

“Love?”

The mage leans down, cupping Hux's jaw in his fingers, and he kisses him again, featherlight.

"Yes, Hux,” he whispers against his lips.

“Love. The light in the darkness."

 


End file.
